Excepted service

Some service positions are classified by the Office of Personnel Management into four categories, although not all excepted service authorities fall into this classification:

• Schedule A appointments are "impracticable to examine". They are used to appoint specific position types such as attorneys, chaplains, physicians; when there is a critical hiring need or the position is in a remote location; and to hire disabled applicants. In addition to this, as of 2016, there were 122 agency-unique Schedule A hiring authorities.[2][4]
• Schedule B appointments are "not practicable to hold a competitive examination". Schedule B appointees must meet the qualification standards for the job. As of 2016, there were 36 agency-unique Schedule B hiring authorities.[2][4]
• Schedule C appointments are political appointments to confidential or policy-setting positions.[2][4]
• Schedule D appointments are those where competitive service requirements "make impracticable the adequate recruitment of sufficient numbers". These are known as the Pathways Programs, which consist of the Internship Program, Recent Graduates Program, and Presidential Management Fellows Program.[2][4]
• Schedule E appointments are administrative law judges.[5]

In addition to these schedules, the Donald J Trump Administration established Schedule F, designed to apply to "confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions".[6]. On his second full day in office, President Joe Biden eliminated Schedule F through an Executive Order.[7]

Schedules A and B were created by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, Schedule C was created in 1956, and Schedule D was created in 2012.[2] Schedule E was created in 2018[5] and Schedule F in 2020.[6] The creation of Schedule F by the Trump administration was controversial, as it was estimated to cause tens or hundreds of thousands of career employees to lose civil service protections,[8] and increase the number of political appointments by a factor of ten.[9] The Office of Management and Budget placed 88% of its career staff into Schedule F positions in December 2020, but that action was nullified by the elimination of Schedule F on January 22, 2021.[10]

Several excepted service hiring authorities are not classified into the four schedules. Some of the more prevalent include:

• Title 38 appointments are for the Department of Veterans Affairs to hire certain medical occupations.[3] The National Institutes of Health also uses Title 38 appointments for health care occupations that provide direct patient care services or services incident to it.[11]
• There is an excepted service hiring authority for National Guard technicians, used for the Army Reserve Technician Program and Air Reserve Technician Program.[3]
• There is a special Veterans Recruitment Appointment authority.[3]
• There are also agency-wide excepted service authorities, of which the largest are the Transportation Security Administration and Federal Aviation Administration.[3]
• A Title 42 appointment allows scientists and special consultants to be hired as part of the Public Health Service or Environmental Protection Agency under a streamlined process.[12][13]
• The Senior Biomedical Research Service, formally the Silvio O. Conte Senior Biomedical Research and Biomedical Product Assessment Service, is for scientific and technical experts in biomedical research, clinical research evaluation, and biomedical product assessment.[14] It was created by the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990[15][16] and implemented in 1995, because the National Institutes of Health concluded that the Senior Executive Service was not ideally suited for their purposes, and a personnel system more similar to academia was needed.[16] Initially there was a cap of 500 individuals in the Service,[16][17] but the 21st Century Cures Act increased this to 2000 individuals in 2016.[17]